THISISGAME, where Korean games industry news meet you

Archive for: September 2009

I am not sure the game is worth to check out since it’s not out yet but I am surprised there was no online cricket game before. That alone proves why HowZat deserves some publicity. A company behind HowZat is Game Ventures, a start-up company registered in Singapore. According to their press release, other projects include XuQa.com ? An online gaming community with 1.6 million registered players and a significant user base in Turkey and the Near East. The company was founded in February, 2009 and has 15 core team members working on this project.

HowZat is currently accessible by invitation only and will be available to the public on the 5th of October.

Another prepaid card provider enters the North American market. Open Network Entertainment, Inc (ONE) was formed through a joint venture between LTI Global-US and Payletter-Korea in 2009, to create the ONE Power-Up Game Card. The ONE Power-Up Game Card is a value-added prepaid product for online games, virtual worlds, and social networks. For more information, go to www.ONEgamecard.com

Another discontinuing-games news from NCsoft and this time it’s from Korea. The company made it official that Atrix(에이트릭스: Kor), a casual game that has been serviced via its game portal PlayNC, will be shut down on September 30. The reason? Not enough users after its launch 3 years ago. It’s still unknown what would happen to its non-Korean services in Taiwan and China since key developers of the game at GalaxyGate left the company.

This also begs another question about casual game business at PlayNC. NCsoft plunged into casual games in 2005 as launching PlayNC, the company had an ambition of dominating both MMORPG and casual game regimes. They started with 5 casual games and web board games but soon dropped 4 games out of 5. (The sole survivor is Exteel.)

Then in 2007, NCsoft introduced series of new games likes of Atrix, Point Blank, Dragonica, and Punch Monster to resurrect its casual game business. But no luck so far. Atrix and Point Blank barely made 10,000,000 Won (US$ 7,700) per month in 1H09. Nothing comes out from Dragonica and Punch Monster after CBT last year. Only Love Beat is doing OK as it’s been co-publishing via other portal sites.

If you want to read the original article on TIG which is written in Korean,?click here.

ESTsoft, a previously well-known company for its software tools in Korea,?announced that its in-house development, Cabal Online, signed a series of publishing agreements with local partners; PT. Speed soft for Indonesia, Gameforge for German, Nival Network for Russia.

GigaMedia, a Taiwan-based Entertainment Service firm, invested 8.2 billion Won (US$ 6.2 million) in JCE as taking up 12.5% shares of the company. The investment agreement put GigaMedia as the second largest shareholder of JCE.

GigaMedia owns a Shanghai-based online game operator T2CN, which is a local?publishing?partner of FreeStyle, JCE’s street basketball game.

If you want to read the original article on TIG which is written in Korean,?click here